To improve email personalization, start with your email popup

When collecting an email address, wouldn’t it be great if you could capture another bit of information about your new subscribers? Something that affords a peek into what intrigues and speaks to them? 

Well, you can. And what we have in mind isn’t creepy, in case you’re worried about crossing any privacy lines. 

It’s a matter of adding one more form field (or more, if you’re so inclined) to your email popup, where you ask your visitor to make a choice of some kind. 
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Are they interested in women’s or men’s clothes (or both), for instance? 

Let’s dig into why you’d want to add this to your email popup (hint: more first-party data can help you segment your email addresses) and what you can do with the resulting information.
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Why you should use email popups to gather more data

Let's say your shop celebrates a specific city or region with a broad range of products. Clothing for adults, children, and even pets boasts local pride. You’ve also got collectibles, from keychains engraved with hometown sayings to works of art featuring city skylines, architectural gems and nature mainstays. 

Imagine having a better idea of which subscribers care about attire for women, versus those who want to see home furnishings. When you get these insights, you’re gathering preferential data of a subscriber’s likes and what they value — data that’s key to improving your business. 

For one, data may collectively start to expose what shoppers want. Yes, sales are a large indication. But subscriber-identified interests can be another bit of information that verifies you’re on the right track or pushes you to evaluate your product mix. 

But there’s something bigger: access to individual subscribers’ preferences opens a door to fostering more substantial connections. You have the keys for better email personalization, which ultimately helps your bottom line.  

A McKinsey & Company study has shown that tailored promotions have the power to:

• Increase conversion rates up to 15%
• Elevate sales by 2%
• Decrease marketing costs up to 20%

I’ll reveal how to use this data to improve email personalization in a bit. But first, let’s examine how a few brands incorporate this technique in their email popups.  
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Don't want to rely on a discount to entice subscribers? Check out 8 email popup examples that prove it's possible.

Email popup examples that embrace tags

The good news for Shopify merchants is that weaving extra form fields into an email popup is not yet common. Read: this is your chance to be on the cutting edge! 

I found a few treasures that demonstrate the more novel capabilities of an email popup. Each example demonstrates how to use one of the three setups available through Seguno’s popup app:

• Drop-down list
• Single-select list (with radio buttons)
• Multi-select list (with checkboxes)
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Lunya

If you’ve got apparel for everyone, then asking whether your subscriber prefers “women,” “men,” or both is a standard practice. You could even toss in “children” if applicable. 

Lunya does it with a drop-down menu — a small ask after offering $20 off of a $100+ order.  

Dormify  

Dormify employs a great segment-producing technique that highlights one way to use the single-selection option. Each category of subscriber they’ve identified has distinct interests and spending levels. I’d guess that a college student residing in relatively cramped and temporary quarters sees things differently than an apartment dweller who has more space — and hopefully more money — to furnish. 

Oh, and the 15% off short-term win is a nice incentive to sign up, too. 

Brilliant Earth

Brilliant Earth shows how the jewelry industry can benefit from a checkbox list in its email popup. A subscriber is prompted to select as many options as they’d like, which means they can be assigned to multiple customer tags. 

(They, too, have a sweet signup incentive. Free shipping and returns? That’s hitting the consumer jackpot.) 

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With Seguno’s popup app, it's easy to define the tag for each choice. Subscribers are automatically marked with the accompanying tag in Shopify.

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How to leverage data with email marketing

Once you’ve deployed a data-collection field on your email popup, then what? Don’t tuck that data away. You’re collecting it for a reason and there are ways to put it to good use. 

Take these two actions:  

1. Send a tailored welcome message
2. Drum up ideas for future newsletters and implement them

Let’s return to our fabricated shop, where the products act as a city’s visual cheerleader. If you know a subscriber wants updates on children’s clothing, then send them a welcome message centered around it. You do it by creating a customer-tagged email automation. 

Pop in product images of some best-selling onesies and t-shirts. It’s not a bad idea to add, toward the bottom of the email, sections that highlight the shop’s other categories, too. Disable the regular welcome automation so they’re not receiving two messages upon signup. 

Of course, you’ll want to create versions for the remaining categories in the email popup. 

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Formulate your welcome email automation or series with our best practices and ideas.   

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The welcome automation is step one. But it’s important to continue delivering personalized content. It’s what your subscribers expect. 

You’re running a sale on all artwork. Send a newsletter with a unique discount code to the segment of subscribers under the correlating tag. 

You need to clear out inventory for a new clothing collection. Give your apparel-tagged subscribers first access. Craft a compelling email subject line so they don't miss it in the inbox.  

There are any number of ways to tailor messages to your tagged customers and boost email personalization. If you’re low on promotional email ideas, I’m sure our must-have newsletters course can help jumpstart ideas for your different segments. 

I urge you to use your email popups to collect information beyond contact details. What makes sense for your shop? When you add just one more field to populate, you expand the potential for reaching all of your subscribers in a more meaningful way.